What Happens When Guy Kawasaki Shares Your Content?

**Please note that this article was originally posted to an older blog of mine which I have since taken offline.**

After reading this piece on digital influencer marketing on the Marketo blog, I wanted to share an experience I had recently with my own blog.

Sometimes, all it takes to get noticed in this world is a good piece of PR, being in the right place at the right time, or someone influential singing your praises.

Recently, I was fortunate enough to have one of my articles shared by someone with a great deal of influence on the web… Guy Kawasaki.

I've had various pieces of content shared by all kinds of people in the past, but because the piece of content in question was from a brand new blog, it perfectly demonstrates how quickly your content can gain traction.

In this article I’ll show you the profound effect a few simple social shares from Guy had on the volume of traffic reaching my site, and how it helped grow my social channels significantly.

Before you ask, I’m not presenting this information as some kind of brag, I want to share the data with you to demonstrate the amazing boost you can get to your traffic when a person or company of influence shares your content with their network.

Before I begin…

Before I dive right in and give you the numbers that you’re interested in, I think it’s important to give a little background information on my blog to give you a bit of perspective on these numbers and why they’re important.

First of all, this blog is very young. I only set this blog up at the beginning of May, and to date, I have done very little in the form of promotion to get it out in the open. Apart from a little social media, there has been very little going on in terms of promotional work.

Something else I should make you aware of is the fact that I’ve also done very little in terms of SEO. I decided this blog would be a slow burner as I have a number of client commitments and am also employed full time.

I’m not looking for explosive growth on this blog as it is something I'm simply putting together as a hobby. I’m instead concentrating on producing some of the best content I can and giving good advice to those who ask for it.

Who is Guy Kawasaki?

For those in the technology and marketing world, Guy Kawasaki certainly shouldn’t require an introduction. For the benefit of those of you who are unfamiliar with him, I’ll give a brief introduction to him and his work.

Guy has worked for some of the biggest brands on the planet and his CV includes a Chief Evangelist position at Apple, he has worked as a special advisor to the CEO at Motorola, and other advisory and evangelist positions have been held, or are currently held, at Canva, StumbleUpon, TripWire and Ustream.

As a result, he has amassed a huge social media following. With over 1.4 million followers on Twitter and over 6 million followers on Google+. 

So you can see why it’s a big deal for bloggers when Guy Kawasaki shares their content.

The content that Guy Kawasaki shared

The article that got shared was a simple list post entitled ‘My Top 5 Internet Marketing Blogs’. After receiving a number of tweets, messages and emails asking for advice on different subjects, I decided to write a post simply listing and describing my 5 favourite internet marketing blogs so people could add my favourite sources of information and inspiration to their RSS readers.

One of the blogs I listed in the article was the Canva blog, and Guy Kawasaki just so happens to be the chief evangelist for the company. Guy must’ve become aware of my article after I tweeted Canva and made them aware of the fact that I’d chosen them as one of my top 5 blogs.

As a result, he then went on to share my article across all of his social channels.

This was never something I intended to happen, and when it did, I was shocked by the results on my blog.

So let’s take a look at the numbers…

As my blog is in it’s infancy, in the lead up to to the 19th July (the day Guy shared my article), I was experiencing fairly typical traffic volumes for a young blog, ranging between roughly 30-90 sessions per day and 591 sessions in total between 1st July – 18th July.

As you can see, my blog wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire. However, that changed once Guy shared the article on his social channels. I published the article around 3pm GMT on Saturday 19th July. And then this happened…

Over the next 3 days my blog received 4,420 page views from 3,478 unique user sessions. Considering this was a social share from just one person, it’s amazing to think that it managed to destroy my traffic performance on the website for the previous 2 months combined.

Not only did it smash my average daily traffic volumes, it also doubled my daily average going forward.

From this you can see the awesome power of influencer marketing in all it’s glory.

As well as the heavily boosted traffic volumes, the article was also shared a great deal by my readers. 

As you can see from the image above, the article was shared over 1,300 times. This all happened because one influential person shared the article.

What can we learn from this?

The first thing we can take from this experience, is the fact that influencer marketing can be very effective. Whilst getting Guy Kawasaki to share my content was never my objective, having someone as influential as he is to share my article has perfectly demonstrated the awesome effect influencer marketing can have.

Another thing we can take from this (if we didn’t know it already), is that there are an infinite number of awesome opportunities out there on the web to get ourselves heard and stand out from the crowd. It took a simple social share to get my article in front of a lot of people.

How should influencer marketing be approached?

After seeing the success I had with influencer marketing, you may be thinking to yourself that you’re going to start filling your future blog posts with links to highly influential people and blogs and then bombard them on their social channels. Whilst you should definitely be linking to others on the web, don’t let it lead your content purely because you want to get some social shares from these people.

Link to influencers when it makes sense to do so.

Include them in your conversation. Don’t go out there with a goal of getting shared by these people. If you do that, it’s likely that you’ll get a frosty response from them and eliminate all possibility of them pushing your content in the future. Invite them into your conversation. If they like the content you’re putting out there, they may share it.

Whilst I say don’t bombard the influencers, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t contact them all. If you link to some content produced by a digital influencer, don’t be afraid to send them a tweet telling them you’ve done so. They’d be interested in reading an article that links to their content and if you don’t tell them, they won’t know.

I’d love to hear about your influencer marketing experiences

I hope you’ve found this article enlightening and useful. I’d love to hear any stories you may have where a digital influencer has shared some of your content and what effect it had on your traffic/sales.

Please feel free to leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading guys!